Prohibition in the Napa Valley: Castles Under Siege

history.

Chapter 1

POETRY OR POISON?

THE EARLY TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

Americans have been warning each other not to drink too much alcohol since colonial days. They called moderation in the consumption of intoxicating beverages temperance, and they had good reason to admonish one another. Far from being models of sobriety, the Puritans and their colonial descendants were sloshing with alcohol much of the time. They brewed it from whatever they could get their hands on: flowers, weeds, carrots, tomatoes, apples, grapes, corn, onions and squash, among other things. Much of America’s initial wealth came from trade involving slaves, sugar and rum, and the original English and northern European settlers of the eastern seaboard drank the rum in astonishingly large quantities, along with brandy, gin, wine and beer. Beer was often the beverage of choice for children, who fetched it from the brewer in bucketfuls for use at the family table. Intoxicated since youth, many colonial Americans suffered from some form of undiagnosed alcoholism themselves or from the alcoholism of their close relatives, a condition known today as co-dependency.

After the American Revolution, when money was in short supply and the citizens were reduced to bartering, farmers in some parts of the country used whiskey as a form of currency, home-brewed from leavings of the harvest in exchange for other necessities of life. Observing this, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton levied a tax on alcohol, which infuriated the farmers and led to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791–94, the first test of the United States government’s willingness to enforce unpopular laws about alcohol or anything else. Taxes derived from the sale of alcoholic products have been a mainstay of the American economy since the nation’s earliest days.

The problem of addiction did not go unnoticed. Founding Father Benjamin Rush, MD, wrote and lectured on the dangers of alcohol to the brains of those who drank it, although his idea of a temperance drink involved consuming a cocktail of wine and opium. The truth that some people were physiologically unable to drink moderately was not understood. An inability to hold one’s liquor indicated, for men anyway, a lack of manliness that was to be avoided. It also suggested moral weakness. Men of good character (especially from the privileged classes), even those who staggered about most evenings, were usually not seen as having issues with alcohol unless they drained away the family resources or were caught brutalizing their wives.

Most Protestant ministers, who themselves drank, preached from the pulpit about the evils of immoderation in drink. Some of them were quite persuasive. There was nothing in the Bible about complete abstention from intoxicating beverages—a fact well known to everyone, since the Bible was standard reading for every literate man, woman and child in early America. Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a daring and ambitious preacher who felt called to do the Bible one better. He promoted the virtue of complete abstinence from alcohol and was able to attract a loyal following who felt convinced that through abstinence they were spiritually purer than their beer-swilling, rum-chugging peers. He published a popular set of six sermons on the subject of intemperance that was reprinted in several languages. It won him a good deal of recognition and provided some extra funds, which he needed in order to raise his thirteen children. Women were especially positive about Beecher’s concept of abstinence, since it was they who usually suffered the consequences of their husbands’ intoxication. Beecher also preached fiery sermons on the evils of the Unitarian Church, a rival for the minds and souls of New Englanders. This faith-based hate soon expanded to include Catholicism as well. His hatred of Catholicism became so infectious that after he gave a sermon on it in Boston, someone burned down the local Ursuline convent.

The early temperance movement spawned a number of splinter groups dedicated to cleaning up what many believed were their fellow countrymen’s lax morals. Some, like the followers of Baptist lay preacher William Miller, combined the non-biblical call for abstinence with admonishments to observe the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday), dress modestly and obey other dicta drawn mainly and often loosely from the Old Testament. The end of the world was near, he preached, and only the morally fit (meaning sober and conservatively attired) would be chosen when Christ came again. Many permutations of the idea that temperance was a Christian necessity were spun in American churches in the mid-nineteenth century. The cloth woven from New World Protestantism and the push for abstinence from intoxicating drink would be the fabric that became the prohibition movement, as shall be seen.

Most of the people who heard these early diatribes against drink had immigrated to the New World from Britain and northern Europe. Some were from aristocratic families who maintained their Tory affiliation and moved in a small, select circle of their own. They often attended the Episcopal Church, the Americanized version of the Church of England, which was an Anglicized version of Catholicism. As in Catholicism, wine was an integral part of the Episcopalian liturgy, and sermons about ending its use altogether made no sense to them. Most Americans, however, were from the working classes. They were Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers—mainline Protestants without a liturgical tradition involving wine.

With the exception of Maryland, which was Roman Catholic, all the original states were almost entirely Protestant. This demographic began to change in the 1840s, when famine and war drove emigrants from new places, especially Ireland, Germany and southern Europe. This fresh wave of newcomers included large numbers of Catholics and a much smaller number of Jews. Forced into low-paying jobs as laborers and factory workers, a common denominator among immigrants to the eastern states in the nineteenth century was poverty and all that went with it, including disease, crime, despair and the tragedy of alcoholism, which often began as an attempt to self-medicate. Lifting the glass meant lifting the spirits, literally and figuratively. Many in the traditional middle class saw only as far as the glass and believed that the poor were morally degenerate, lured into darkness by Demon Rum and, as pastor Beecher had explained, the Catholic Church.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

The year 1848 was pivotal for California, America and the globe. Until that year, California had been part of Spain and then Mexico, but when the Mexican-American War ended in February, a vast new world opened up—one without an entrenched establishment that was steeped in East Coast tradition. Almost simultaneously, gold was discovered in the Sierra foothills, although most people were not aware of it until 1849.

This brought a massive and sudden influx of American men hoping to find their fortune in a new territory just waiting to be populated. The Gold Rush also beckoned some women of adventurous spirit, usually camp followers who provided distraction for the men. Many of these found work in San Francisco, but the Napa Valley—a popular tourist destination for the miners—also became home to many ladies of the night.

The first to gather Sierra gold were the soldiers and pioneers who were already in California when James Marshall first discovered it, although not everyone who sought it found huge amounts. One of the ’48ers was Harrison Pierce, an American sailor who had jumped ship sometime around 1843 and eventually made his way to the embryonic city of Napa. With skills he had learned doing carpentry for other pioneers, he began to construct the pueblo’s first commercial building, a saloon near the Napa River. Perhaps sampling too much of the inventory, Pierce and his buddy Nicholas Higuera, the original owner of the land, misread the surveyors’ marks and placed it in the middle of what would become Main Street. They moved it, and just as they were starting the roof, word came that gold had been discovered in the Sierras. They dropped their hammers, joined a band of adventurers and rushed to find gold. After a few months, Pierce apparently realized that an easier way to gather gold was to collect it from the miners in exchange for booze and other pleasures. He returned to Napa, put the roof on the building and opened for business. His Empire Saloon was a hit.

Alert to a promising business opportunity, Napa pioneers Joe Chiles and Billy Baldridge built a still on Baldridge’s property near what is now Yountville and provided tax-free wares for Pierce and subsequent Napa barkeeps to sell. Already admired for being among the very first to settle down in the area, Chiles and Baldridge were additionally appreciated for their whiskey. Chiles also planted grapes and may have made wine for his personal use on his remote ranch in Chiles Valley, east of what is now St. Helena.

An Englishman named John Patchett had been trained as a brewer. He bought some of Higuera’s land near what are now Clay and Calistoga Streets, on which were planted mission grapes. He may have made beer at first, but he is remembered today for hiring Charles Krug to be his winemaker. Krug was a small, genial Prussian whose business partner, Agostin Haraszthy, had just started a winery in Sonoma called Buena Vista. Legend has it that Krug used a small, borrowed cider press to crush the grapes that became the first commercially sold wine in the Napa Valley. The site of this auspicious event was somewhere around First and Monroe Streets in Napa.

Charles Krug made wine for commercial sale in Napa in 1858.

The population of early Napa Valley consisted of a blend of Americans and Europeans, with a few Mexican landowners like Higuera and, at first, several hundred Native Americans. The Indians were only a remnant of the pre-contact demographic, which had been decimated by disease in the 1820s and ’30s. The native population was especially dense in what would become Rutherford and Calistoga, but it dwindled rapidly as the Caucasians made a concerted effort to drive them out. The tragic specter of emaciated, bedraggled and severely inebriated Indians watching the boat traffic at the embarcadero in Napa was common.

The Americans, who were in the majority, tended to hold the same general value system as did their counterparts back east and were very familiar with the ideas promulgated by temperance groups. The city of St. Helena—soon to become the heart of the premium wine industry—got its name when members of the local Sons of Temperance club were playing horseshoes at the blacksmith’s shop, circa 1852. The little community that was forming around them needed to be called something more distinctive than Hot Springs Township, its original designation. They decided to call it St. Helena, not for the beatified mother of Constantine but for the mountain that was clearly visible to the northwest. The Sons of Temperance had already adopted the mountain’s name for their group: they were the St. Helena Chapter of the Sons of Temperance. It was by no means unusual for little towns to have temperance groups. They were fraternal, mutual help associations designed to keep men manly and virtuous by drinking in moderation or not at all, and thus out of trouble with their wives. Institutions like the Sons helped preserve the values they had known back home. Like the Masons, the Sons provided help in time of sickness and funds for their members’ funerals.

There was little time for California’s original pioneer stratum to become a deeply rooted ruling class, because a new layer of Gold Rush hopefuls soon followed the ’48ers and ’49ers. In addition to huge numbers of Americans, this fresh wave of newcomers included the same mass of Catholic and Jewish immigrants that had been pouring into the cities of the East Coast. Rather than disembarking in eastern ports like New York and Boston, some of these foreign-born men (and a few women) sailed all the way to California. Jewish merchants like Freedman Levinson and his wife, Dora, who were Prussians, were instrumental in establishing commerce in every city in Napa County. The Levinsons were among the city’s original Caucasian inhabitants. Their children and grandchildren became pillars of Napa society.

Anyone with the drive and desire to work hard could make a good living in California, or so it seemed. Hard work and hard play put everyone on the same level, regardless of religion or national origin, and much of the miners’ social lives revolved around a shared bottle on a cold night. African Americans, who were still slaves in the southern states, drank